Berkshire Farmers Choose Cooperation over Competition

Berkshire Farmers Choose Cooperation Over Competition

By Martha Jackson Suquet

Jamie Nadler of Dancing Greens Farm has expanded her vegetable operation thanks to land shared by Tom Brazie of The Farm at New Marlborough.

In many ways, farmers run their operations like other small businesses. They engage in business planning, carefully manage revenue and expenses, and explore marketing channels to connect with customers. Looking more deeply at the Berkshires’ local food system, though, reveals that small-scale farmers also subvert “business as usual”, especially in terms of competing (or not) with other farms.

Farm businesses operate differently because food is unlike any other product on the market: people need it to survive, and producing food is dependent on access to farmland, a finite resource. This reality has led to a food system supported by government agencies, farm subsidies, and agricultural support organizations like Berkshire Grown. But farmers also support each other in ways that defy economic norms.

One significant way farmers support each other is through creatively collaborating. These collaborations, as we’ve found in years of working with Berkshire farmers, are more widespread and more deeply rooted than in other industries. Farmer collaborations extend from small, everyday cooperative acts like sharing tools – to extensive, formal arrangements like collectively-owned farms, tool libraries, or cooperative CSAs.

Through a purely economic lens, it would make sense for a farmer who has developed a new tool, solved a challenging pest problem, or worked out a more efficient technique to keep that knowledge solely for the benefit of their own farm business. In practice, though, many small farmers share those innovations freely. Knowledge and skill-sharing take place both in formal settings like conferences and networking events, and more casually at farmers markets and online listservs.

Image courtesy Field of Love Farm, Sheffield

Farmers markets give farmers opportunities for connection and cooperation. We’ve heard many stories of farmers choosing not to bring certain products to market or even scaling back on growing certain crops because they know another vendor who has a glut of that product that they need to sell. Our on-staff vegetable farmer, Alyssa VanDurme of Field of Love Farm, collaborates with Dandelion Hill Farm, a fellow vendor at the Sheffield Farmers Market. Both farms grow flowers, but instead of competing against each other at the market, they combine their labor and their flowers to create collaborative bouquets. One week Dandelion Hill sells the bouquets, the next week Field of Love sells them.

With farmland difficult to come by in the region, some farmers cooperate to share that valuable resource as well. This season, Dancing Greens Farm has been able to expand their operation thanks to land shared by The Farm New Marlborough. As the Dancing Greens team puts it on their website, this arrangement points to a “community driven farming future”.

Read the entire article here.

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The Berkshire Mobile Farmers Market hits the road

Berkshire Mobile Farmers Market Ambassador Katherine Roberts and Monterey resident Mark Andrews.

The Berkshire Mobile Farmers Market brings fresh, locally-grown food to low-income/low-access areas throughout the Berkshires.

After a successful 10-week pilot season last fall, the Berkshire Mobile Farmers Market will be at 6 sites throughout Berkshire County.

Shoppers will find a variety of seasonal produce at the market, as well as other food staples such as eggs, meat, dairy products, bread, maple syrup and honey. All products are locally sourced.

The market offers a stigma-free shopping experience that prioritizes food access. In addition to welcoming SNAP and HIP benefits, a FairShare payment system lets shoppers select a payment tier based on their unique budget and needs.

Visit berkshiremobilefarmersmarket.org for the full market schedule and more information.

Find fresh, local food at Berkshire Farmers Markets

Top left and clockwise: Scenes from the West Stockbridge Farmers Market, Pittsfield Farmers Market, North Adams Farmers Market, and Williamstown Farmers Market.

Did you know there are 23 different farmers markets in Berkshire County and the surrounding region this summer?

Visit Berkshire Farmers Markets to find a local farmers market near you. Many of the markets feature live music and host artists and crafters.

Use SNAP or HIP, WIC or Senior Coupons? Many of the markets offer Market Match and other budget-boosting programs. Visit Berkshire Farmers Markets for dates, locations, and more information on where SNAP, HIP and other benefits are honored. Click here to learn about HIP program basics and FAQs.

2024 Guide to Local Food & Farms

Read Berkshire Grown's 2024 Guide to Local Food & Farms

here.

The Guide is your resource for local food and farm products!

Use it to find farm stands, CSA farms, pick-your-own farms and orchards, as well as locally sourced value-added products like charcuterie, preserves, and fermented foods and locations and hours of food pantries across the county.

You can also find the best in locally grown food and products near you by using Berkshire Grown's searchable map!

What we're reading:

Hey, that’s not ‘just’ a hayfield

Commentary by Sarah Gardner for The Berkshire Eagle

Bales of hay dot a field in Williamstown. Photo credit Gillian Jones / The Berkshire Eagle.

Nothing says summer in the Berkshires like haying season. Farmers are in the fields mowing, raking, tedding and baling grass, leaving behind round bales of dried hay or wrapped bales of haylage — the giant marshmallows of fermenting grass.

Hayfields are more than pretty; they produce essential animal feed. Artists through the ages have paid homage to hay, from Breugel’s “Hay Harvest” to Van Gogh’s “Haystacks” to John MacDonald’s contemporary Berkshire landscapes. Modern civilization wouldn’t have been possible without hay.

It’s National Dairy Month and time to be thankful for the Berkshires’ cows, dairy farmers and the hay harvest. Domestication of animals enabled humans to transition from a hunter-gatherer existence to pastoralism, thanks to a reliable source of protein. Grass or hay (dried preserved forage) is the basis of beef and milk, and of course, ice cream, as Jamie Pottern of American Farmland Trust reminds us. In cold climates, cows can’t graze year-round: hay allows them to survive through the winter and produce milk, too. Grass and milk are inextricably linked through the magic of the ruminant’s four-compartment stomach. As Wally Chenail of Chenail Brothers Dairy Farm put it, “You take grass and run it through a cow and she transforms it from a protein that’s indigestible to humans into a protein-packed food we can use.”

Hayfields are critical to food security in the Berkshires, where the rocky clay soils and hilly topography are especially well-suited to growing grass and less ideal for vegetables.

Read the entire article here.

Asian American farm collective targets food insecurity: ‘It’s been really healing’

By Marin Scotten for TheGaurdian.org

Choy Commons community crew in the greenhouse at Gentle Time Farm in Chatham, New York, with farm co-owners Kaija Xiao and Salt Wang. Photograph: Tiffany Kim/Courtesy of Choy Commons.

New York’s Choy Commons builds supply chain of heirloom vegetables while reviving an agricultural legacy.

Every Wednesday afternoon, seniors, community groups and restaurants across Manhattan Chinatown receive boxes of freshly grown Asian heirloom vegetables – it could be cabbage, Thai basil, bitter melon, chili peppers, okra or green stem cauliflower, depending on the season. The produce was grown by a small group of Asian American farmers upstate who are on a mission to make these staples more affordable and accessible for their own communities.

“I want our food to go to people who would really love it, but would not have access to it without money,” said Amanda Wong, a 34-year-old farmer and co-owner of Star Route Farm in Charlotteville, New York. She’s part of a collective of Asian American farmers in the Hudson Valley region known as Choy Commons, which grows ancestral foods and then works with mutual aid groups to distribute them, often for free, among the Asian American community.

By connecting Asian American communities with Asian-owned small-scale farms, Wong says Choy Commons is building a new kind of supply chain “from the ground up”.

Asian Americans in particular are in need of this new kind of food chain.

Read the article here.

Berkshire Grown's 2023 Impact Report:

Share the Bounty

In 2023, Berkshire Grown’s Share the Bounty program completed its 21st season buying CSA shares from local farms and delivering those farm-fresh products to food pantries in the Berkshires, Hudson Valley, and Northwestern Connecticut. This long-running program provides small-scale farmers with advanced funding toward the cost of buying seeds and operating expenses during the winter months.

In 2023 Berkshire Grown arranged for more than 74 CSA shares of produce, meat, cheese, and eggs from 18 local farms to be delivered directly to 20 food pantries and community kitchens in the region, or to subsidize low-income families to participate in CSA programs at their local farms. As our Farm to Food Access programs expand, Share the Bounty remains an important avenue to support smaller CSA farmers who don’t sell products wholesale, yet want to participate in local food access programs.

Read the 2023 Impact Report to learn more about Berkshire Grown's work.